How to Improve Client Relations and Internal Communication

You hear it over and over in leadership trainings; successful teams, agencies, and media companies are built on the foundation of solid communication. If you’re looking to improve efficiencies, then work smarter and eliminate communication gaps with your team and your clients.

This article will present some of the key communication challenges within various departments at your agency or media company. But, the fun doesn’t stop there. We’ll also cover how you can improve communication within your company and to your clients.

Marketing agencies and media companies require collaboration across teams for success. However, when you don’t have the right tools for effective communication, it’s so easy to get used to working in silos.

When team members start working in silos, it exacerbates pain points you may be experiencing. These pain points include missing important deadlines, miscommunications, lack of visibility, errors in order entry and reporting, and more.

For example, let’s look at basic communication concerns of a sales team vs. an AdOps team at an agency.

As soon as a salesperson lands a deal, they have a myriad of vital pieces of information they must accurately convey to AdOps/Fulfillment. Once they have communicated this information, they need to be able to access information to check on the progress of an order.

Points of concern for a member of an agency sales team could include:

Are customer expectations clear and have they been captured and communicated accurately

How can I explain order details to AdOps?

What inventory is available?

Why is it so hard to enter an order from the field?

Why don’t I subsequently have visibility into order status?

Similarly, AdOps teams may have points of concern too including:

Is the order being fulfilled properly?

What is the order status?

How do I know what’s happening after I submit an order?

And more!

Without the right tools, it’s difficult for team members to properly communicate with each other and to ensure accuracy. To truly be successful, Sales, Marketing, AdOps, Creative, and Fulfillment need a way to ensure alignment and collaboration.

Similarly, communication trails get lost in emails and texts and voicemails. Collaborating and tracking from one place is necessary for everyone to clearly understand the original intent of a message. And, when subsequent input/feedback are in one place, it can easily be revisited by anyone.

2. Challenge #2: Manual processes leave the door wide open for errors

Another common pain point for media companies and agencies is experiencing miscommunication, misalignment, and errors that come from using manual processes and disparate tools to manage their workflow.

Take a step back for a moment to evaluate your order and fulfillment processes. Do you have a tool that helps you automate workflow processes or are you manually taking each of your clients through every step of the fulfillment process?

As a member of a media company or digital agency, you know how much purposeful organization and work is required to get workflow processes right, especially for all your clients. You have appointments to manage, ads to create, campaigns to track and monitor, recurring to-dos, and much more.
With the help of order and workflow automation, you can essentially “set it and forget it.” In other words, you can save time by automating these process for your clients and employees. Not to mention when you pull the plug on manual processes in exchange for automation, you eliminate human error and save time.

3. Challenge #3: Communicating your agency’s value to clients

Another common problem agencies experience is being able to communicate their value to clients.

This task is especially difficult if you have internal communication problems or are relying on manual processes to communicate order and workflow tasks.

However, even if you have internal communication and your order and workflows down pat, it can still be difficult to really show your clients your value.

That is, it’s difficult without the right tools.

Solution: The TapClicks Agency Performance Platform

As a quick review, 3 of the top communication challenges for agencies include:

Optimizing internal communication processes,

Keeping teams aligned and up-to-speed when you’re using manual order and workflow processes, and

Communicating your value to your clients.

Let’s talk about the solution that helps solve all three of these problems and more. Enter the TapClicks Agency Performance Platform.

TapClicks is the only company that comprehensively manages marketing data and operations for agencies, media companies, and brands. This is accomplished through the TapClicks TapClicks Agency Performance Platform (TapClicks Agency Performance Platform). The TapClicks Agency Performance Platform is made up of 4 products that work together to streamline order entry, improve workflows, consolidate analytics, and make reporting easy for digital agencies.

Improve Communications

With TapClicks, everyone at your media company or agency has access to these 4 products. This means, your sales team can enter customer information and orders and automap tasks through workflows. The use of one platform for orders and workflows provides full transparency and visibility for every team member. This makes it possible for every team member at your agency to stay aligned, receive automated updates, and check progress whenever.

When everyone on your team has full access to the customer journey, it provides everyone in the company with the same access to the same information, makes storytelling easier, and promotes collaborative work.

Not to mention, you can use the TapClicks tool to make notes, send messages, and add communications about specific client accounts. Collaborating and tracking from one place (instead of via email or voicemail) ensures the original intent and subsequent input/feedback are unified and easy to revisit.

Automate Manual Processes with TapClicks

With the help of TapClicks, you also no longer have to worry about manual processes for all of your clients.

With TapClicks, gone are the days of hearing a member of your fulfillment team say they never got the details from the sales team that an order was made. You never have to hear your sales team say they don’t understand what is required of them to help move a customer along from the sale to a satisfied customer.

The TapClicks Agency Performance Platform eliminates these communication drawbacks in three significant ways.

First, as mentioned above, it gives everyone on the team complete visibility into the customer journey. That way if any team member has a question, they can login to the TapClicks Agency Performance Platform and see all the details pertaining to a client’s account.

Second, it acts as the primary communication tool between departments. Any agent can add notes directly into the TapClicks Agency Performance Platform. This eliminates the problem of emails getting lost, meetings about clients getting postponed, or problems that result from simple face-to-face miscommunications.

Finally, once a task is entered into the system, it’s completely automated. You don’t have to worry about using a series of sticky notes, or a spreadsheet, or reminders in your email calendar to try and remember to move a task forward. Everything in the TapClicks Agency Performance Platform is automated. This eliminates errors, saves time, and keeps everyone on track.

Communicate Your Value to Your Clients

Finally, TapClicks includes TapAnalytics and TapReports that help you communicate the value of your agency to your clients.With TapAnalytics, you can easily integrate over 180 data platforms, making it easy to track the progress of all your campaigns for each of your clients. You can also import any custom or spreadsheet data and streamline it with the rest of your data. With live dashboards and the ability to send automated alerts, it’s easy for your marketing team to create campaigns that drive results. TapAnalytics also helps you improve your team’s responsiveness by identifying issues and capitalizing on opportunities for optimization. This is a surefire way to impress clients.

Then, with TapReports, you can send clients beautiful reports showing off your progress. Reports are 100% customizable and offer beautiful visualizations that help you tell a better data story. With the help of customizable, automated, and real-time reporting, you can show your clients exactly how your agency is positively affecting their bottom line.

Wrap Up

As a digital agency or media company, you have a lot on your plate. It takes hard work form several members of Marketing, Sales, AdOps, Creative, and more to make sales, enter sales, create and manage workflows, manage campaigns, and show value. And, it takes the help of tailored technologies to make sure you can manage tasks, avoid errors, and communicate effectively.